Rattibha

“I’m necessarily parasitic in a way. I have done well as a parasite. But I’m still a parasite.” - Malcolm Gladwell
America's favorite propogandist: a thread

In his own words:
"Have I given paid speeches to companies or industries mentioned or affected by that article? Yes I have. As I stated earlier, I have given my Tipping Point talk to groups of doctors, hospitals, insurers, as well as Pharmacy Benefit Managers and groups funded

by the National Institutes of Health. More specifically, I have on several occasions over the past four years given paid speeches on the Tipping Point to pharmaceutical companies. So did that create a bias in favor of the pharmaceutical industry?"

The quote above is from a 2004 disclosure statement issued on Gladwell's personal website after his New Yorker article, which defended the high cost of prescription drug, caused a minor controversy and raised concerns about his financial conflicts of interests
Oops!

If you cover Wall Street, should you take Wall Street speaking fees?
Is it even possible to shill for Enron or even breast cancer?
What does "accumulating points in corporate circles" mean even mean?
If it wasn't for Malcom, we'd never ask such things
nytimes.com

www.nytimes.com

Among corporate shills, who - or what - is the most effective? Propaganda works best when it is not perceived as propaganda: nuance, obfuscation, distraction, suggestion, the subtle introduction of doubt - these are more effective in the long run than shotgun blasts of lies

The master of this approach is Malcolm Gladwell

Malcom Gladwell is an essayist for the New Yorker and a bestselling author. He's sold zillions of copies, and treated as a public intellectual and pop guru extraordinaire. His shtick consists of coming off as a disinterested public intellectual like few others, right down to the

frizzy hairdo and smock-y getups. So is his political aloofness, high-brow contrarianism and constant challenges to “popular wisdom”
Under this carefully crafted persona and image - one finds a common huckster on the take. Its also all on public record

Gladwell has shilled for Big Tobacco, Pharma and defended Enron-style financial fraud, all while earning hundreds of thousands of dollars as a corporate speaker, sometimes from the same companies and industries that he covers as a journalist

Even scumbags can be respected - he is a one-man branding and distribution pipeline for valuable corporate messages, constructed on the public’s gullibility in trusting his probity and intellectual honesty in the pages of The New Yorker, and other highly prominent media outlets

Its not just people in entertainment, comedy, the arts or sports who come from up north to 'make it' here in the United States. This also includes propogandists who were smart enough to sell their shadow to Baal or Baphomet but keep their soul (mostly) intact

From humble leaf to college right-wing Reagan supporter, to being trained by the tobacco-funded far-right National Journalism Center, inserting pro-tobacco, pro-banking industry and pharma messages into his books and articles, to raking in about a million a year in speaking alone

To get a good idea of the kind of person I am presenting here, one only consider his tenure at at the Ethics and Public Policy Center - where Gladwell served as assistant editor from 85 - 6. It was created to bridge the gap between neoconservatives and Christian fundamentalists

Ernest Lefever, who founded EPPC in 1976 - said the kind of things about black people that would earn him an invite to Uncle Ruckus' cookout and standing ovation at a particular mongolian basketweaving forum. Gladwell, who is part Jamaican, shrugged and made that money. Atta boy

He apparently didn’t mind working for a guy who argued that people like Gladwell were inferior. Incredibly enough, Gladwell has continued to participate in events with EPPC outfit as late as 2005, and is currently listed on its promotional materials

During college, Gladwell received journalism training at the National Journalism Center, an outfit that worked with the tobacco industry “to train budding journalists... to get across our side of the story," according to an internal Philip Morris document
#id=psvc0127" target="_blank" rel="noopener" onclick="event.stopPropagation()">industrydocuments.ucsf.edu

industrydocuments.ucsf.edu

Armed with this and zero scruples, Gladwell’s reporting leaves in its wake an unabashedly pro-business, anti-regulation bias. Nowhere was this bias more evident than in Gladwell’s barely disguised promotion of the tobacco industry’s agenda

>tfw your reporting on tobacco issues in the early ’90s come just as Big Tobacco is gearing up for a war against looming class-action lawsuits, as well as the mounting pressure for stricter regulation of the industry

Documents and communications later released to the public as part of the tobacco settlement showed that the tobacco industry considered Malcolm Gladwell an important friend. For example, an internal Phillip-Morris document from the mid- to late ’90s listed Gladwell as a

“third party” media asset - someone who could be counted on to rally public support for tobacco industry causes.
#id=fgcw0028" target="_blank" rel="noopener" onclick="event.stopPropagation()">industrydocuments.ucsf.edu

www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu

For those not familiar with public relations industry lingo, “third party” refers to a PR technique in which a corporation’s marketing message is delivered to the public through seemingly independent journalists, academics, non-profits, think tanks and other respected

“third parties” in order to bolster the credibility of “the message” and to conceal the ties between the message and the messenger. In other words, Gladwell was seen as a secret tobacco-industry propagandist.
Malcom Gladwell is a corporate shill without a peer or equal

In The Tipping Point, Gladwell blamed children for getting themselves addicted to tobacco and absolved tobacco industry advertising campaigns of guilt. However, confidential Philip Morris documents bragged, “Marlboro’s phenomenal growth rate in the past has been attributable in

large part to our high market penetration among young smokers . . . 15 to 19 years old.”

Among the documents leaked during the settlement with Big Tabaco was this - A Philip-Morris document, titled “THIRD-PARTY MESSAGE DEVELOPMENT CONTACT LIST,” lists Gladwell alongside dozens of notorious corporate promoters and right-wing journalists, ranging from Fox’s mustachioed

libertarian John Stossel, Bush press secretary and Fox News anchor Tony Snow, Grover Norquist, Milton Friedman and the head of the Heritage Foundation, Ed Feulner. This is a remarkable list, and it includes a disproportionate number of libertarians, like Reason magazine editor

Jacob Sullum—whose role as a paid promoter of big tobacco was also exposed in the tobacco documents
Every industry makes strange bedfellows, and corporate shilling is no exception

In 1999, Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article defending the explosion of ADHD amphetamine prescriptions to children against criticism from media and public figures. Gladwell’s response: “...are too many children taking the drug - or too few?”
newyorker.com

www.newyorker.com

>accumulating points in corporate circles
In 2004, Gladwell was forced to end a business partnership formed with a market research company after David Carr of the NYT exposed the relationship and criticized "Mr. Gladwell's dual career as both a marketer and a writer..."

Gladwell’s shilling for the tobacco industry is ghastly, but it makes more sense given his background. The National Journalism Center, which helped launch Gladwell’s journalistic career, received generous support from the tobacco industry, on the explicit understanding that the

Journalism Center would train up pro-tobacco cub journalists who would later become reliable mouthpieces for tobacco-lobby interests
This relationship is laid out explicitly in a number of internal tobacco-industry documents, including a 1994 Philip Morris strategy report

It described the company’s relationship with the National Journalism Center, and gloated about the success of their strategy:
#id=psvc0127" target="_blank" rel="noopener" onclick="event.stopPropagation()">industrydocuments.ucsf.edu

www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu

In his own words:
"Have I given paid speeches to companies or industries mentioned or affected by that article? Yes I have. As I stated earlier, I have given my Tipping Point talk to groups of doctors, hospitals, insurers, as well as Pharmacy Benefit Managers and groups funded

by the National Institutes of Health. More specifically, I have on several occasions over the past four years given paid speeches on the Tipping Point to pharmaceutical companies. So did that create a bias in favor of the pharmaceutical industry?"

From a 2004 disclosure statement issued on Gladwell's personal website after his New Yorker article, which defended the high cost of prescription drug, caused a minor controversy and raised concerns about his financial conflicts of interests

Because Gladwell largely escaped suspicion, he turned out to be one of the tobacco industry’s most successful investments. Even after leaving the Washington Post, Gladwell continued pumping out pro-tobacco propaganda, and kneecapping or muddying the industry’s critics

Even as tobacco was preparing to settle with the Clinton Administration, Gladwell kept up the barrage of friendly propaganda. His first book, The Tipping Point, published in 2000, has a section on tobacco that, again, reads like something from industry PR. In one passage, he

analyzed various studies into teen smoking and came to the conclusion that kids start smoking at a young age not in any way because of the millions of advertising dollars big tobacco spends targeting kids - but rather because kids just want to be cool and so it was practically

“inevitable that they would also be drawn to the ultimate expression of adolescent rebellion, risk-taking, impulsivity, indifference to others, and precocity: the cigarette.”
What a piece of shit

No really, fuck this guy
In his book, we find the following:
"Over the past decade, the anti-smoking movement has railed against the tobacco companies for making smoking cool and has spent untold millions of dollars of public money trying to convince teenagers that smoking

isn’t cool. But that’s not the point. Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool. [Notice the false antithesis to make Gladwell sound smart and outside-the-box, when he’s actually not saying anything new at all] Smoking epidemics begin in precisely the same way that the suicide

epidemic in Micronesia began or word-of- mouth epidemics begin or the AIDS epidemic began...In this epidemic, as in all others, a very small group - a select few - are responsible for driving the epidemic forward."
TL;DR
It’s all the fault of cool people

Tabaco kills tons of people every year, probably more than all the ODs of all drugs combined (probably if you exclude alcohol related illnesses & death, I'm sure someone out there can do some quick & dirty math to verify)
But you can do worse than shilling for big tobacco

You can shill for big pharma, which is what Malcom Gladwell managed to make a career of on top of being an essayist, published author, and guy who makes money by lying

In 2004, Gladwell published a New Yorker piece that blamed skyrocketing prescription drug prices on users of prescription drugs, not on pharmaceutical companies. New Yorker readers responded angrily, tipping off Slate columnist Jack Schafer that Gladwell took "speaking fees from

corporations and trade associations" that he covered in print, forcing Gladwell to publicly admit that he had had indeed taken money from the pharmaceutical industry: “Have I given paid speeches to companies or industries mentioned or affected by that article? Yes I have.”

You can’t get much worse & more amoral than shilling for tobacco while posing as a mainstream journalist. Once you’ve gone there, there’s nothing holding you back from propagandizing for highly-profitable merchants of death from any industry & by “you” I mean “Malcolm Gladwell”

Along with big tobacco, he took up the cause of the pharmaceutical industry, defending the industry’s right to reap mega-profits on the backs of schoolchildren who were being turned en masse into highly profitable amphetamine addicts. So glad that ADHD thing worked out in the end

The 1990s decade saw a sevenfold increase in the production of ADHD stimulants, causing a growing number of medical professionals to complain that the drug was being over-prescribed & wrongfully prescribed to treat what often would have been considered normal childhood behavior

In 1998, the year before Gladwell’s article came out, Time magazine put Ritalin on its cover and ran a negative story that questioned the skyrocketing use of Ritalin and other powerful psychotropic drugs among American children. Even Hillary Clinton got into the fray, announcing

a campaign to combat the growing problem of overmedicating children
Among other things, drug companies were accused of using aggressive marketing techniques and industry-funded front groups to promote childhood A.D.H.D., frighten and confuse parents, and seduce doctors into

treating hyperactive children with prescription speed. The adverse effects of this highly-profitable enterprise were evident: a study showed that up to one in ten children who were on Ritalin suffered psychotic episodes, including intense hallucinations. The FDA itself came out

with a report that compiled story after story of children, some less than 10 years old, suffering from a range of “hallucinations, both visual and tactile…involving insects, snakes and worms.”
And what was Gladwell’s reaction? He dismissed it all as bunk, and took the side of

the pharmaceutical industry. In his article, which relied heavily on quotes and information provided by A.D.H.D. researchers who later were found to have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry, Gladwell, ever the master of suggestion and nuance, posed the problem this way:

“even with that dramatic increase, the number of American children taking Ritalin is estimated to be one or two per cent. Given that most estimates put the incidence of A.D.H.D. at between three and ﬁve per cent, are too many children taking the drug–or too few?”

In other words, if there’s any problem here, it’s that the kids aren’t being medicated enough! Haha, oh Malcom you rascal

And the hits keep coming

"Our efforts to develop world-class leaders remain a priority. PM USA continued to enhance its leadership development efforts by introducing new sales training programs, increasing the number of employees who have facilitated and attended our leadership development programs and

revamping our recruiting efforts...The program was attended by members of PM USA's senior leadership team & included an overview of PM USA, our Mission and core strategies, a tour of the factory, a lecture by best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell and two evening dinner receptions.

Based on formal evaluation surveys and subsequent discussions and communications with the attendees, the event was very well perceived and rated by the attendees and is having a positive impact on our ongoing recruiting efforts."

TL;DR
Malcom Gladwell = PR and profit even if the thing you're selling will warp and kill the people who use it

You know that "challenging conventional wisdom" brush he gets painted with? Well, it all comes from this one time back in 2004 when the industry was taking a lot of heat for the skyrocketing costs of prescription drugs. True to form, Gladwell published a piece in the New Yorker

challenging the “conventional wisdom” about drug prices, arguing that the poor persecuted pharmaceutical industry was being scapegoated, blamed for problems that were beyond their control. Citing a pharma-funded study, Gladwell, ever the contrarian, located what he argued was the

real reason drug costs were soaring: the victims were to blame, because Americans loved their pills so much they couldn’t buy enough of them, leaving poor drug industry manufacturers struggling to keep up with demand:

"… drug expenditures are rising rapidly in the United States not so much because we’re being charged more for prescription drugs but because more people are taking more medications in more expensive combinations. It’s not price that matters; it’s volume."

His prescription drug argument hinged on a study of drug prices in different countries by two University of Pennsylvania economists that had been published in Health Affairs. Gladwell didn’t mention that the study was funded by pharma giant Merck, nor did he inform his readers

the study’s leading author, economist Patricia M. Danzon, was a paid consultant for the pharmaceutical industry. Danzon’s CV contains a list of “selected consulting experience” with clients such as Merck, Pfizer and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association
Oops!

Gladwell’s article on drug prices and costs also didn’t say much about:
- industry profits
- companies’ profits
- documented cases in which drug companies have been busted engaging in criminal conspiracies to inflate and manipulate prices

- billions in fines and lawsuits
- the various ways the industry pressures, manipulates and cajoles doctors to overmedicate patients, including bribes and kickbacks to doctors that are now routine practice in the medical industry
Oops!

There were plenty of examples for him to choose from, like the 2001 case against TAP Pharmaceutical Products involving both bribery and price manipulation, for which the company settled for nearly $1 billion

Or a lawsuit filed by 29 states against Bristol-Myers Squibb Co in 2002 that accusing them of conspiring to delay the release of a generic cancer drug commonly used to treat ovarian and breast cancer by almost three years in order to keep the price of its own cancer drug, Taxol,

inflated by as much as 30 percent
Oops!

At the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell developed another branch of his branded Malcolm Gladwell, Inc. business: as a highly-paid corporate speaker. Indeed, Gladwell is ranked as one of the highest-paid speakers in America today, commanding anywhere from $40,000 to $80,000 for a

single talk to corporations and industry groups eager to pay for his soothing wisdom. In 2007, Fast Company estimated Gladwell does “roughly 25 speaking gigs a year, his current going rate some $40,000 per appearance.”

That would translate into roughly $1 million that year in speaking fees alone - 4x what he made at the New Yorker in 2005. It’s a huge amount of money, as far as speaker’s salaries go. For comparison: Mitt Romney only made $500,000 in speaking fees in 2010

Despite posing as a credible journalist at one of America’s premiere media outlets - Gladwell has yet to disclose which companies and lobby groups pay him to speak, or how much they pay him

Although he makes more money as a corporate speaker than he does as a journalist for the New Yorker, Gladwell claims that the speaking fees do not affect his reporting - in spite of all evidence to the contrary

Of all things that got Malcom to say anything about this was Brandweek - the trade journal of the marketing industry, was much harsher in its criticism, noting that Gladwell’s pro-pharma article distinguished the New Yorker as one of the few news outlets not critical of

industry’s role in skyrocketing drug prices—and they wondered, correctly, if Gladwell’s paid speaking gigs had anything to do with it.
The criticism was not very loud or sustained. But it was enough to make Gladwell uncomfortable, forcing him to publish an equivocating,

message-confusing, rambling “disclosure statement” on his personal website that clocked in at over 6,000 words
It was published on December 2004, and it began:

"As a writer I wear two hats. I am a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, where I have been under contract more or less continuously since 1996. I also do public speaking, based on my second career as the author of two books - The Tipping Point and Blink. Over the past four

or five years, I have given talks to corporations, trade associations, conventions of one sort or another, colleges, think tanks, charitable groups, public lecture series and, on one occasion (arranged by my mother) my old high school. For some of those engagements, I have been

paid. For those given to academic and charitable organizations, I generally have not…"
Seems straightforward enough, right?
Wrong: it took Gladwell 5,000 words before he finally addressed the reason he posted this Bible-length disclosure in the first place:

"Have I given paid speeches to companies or industries mentioned or affected by that article? Yes I have. As I stated earlier, I have given my Tipping Point talk to groups of doctors, hospitals, insurers, as well as Pharmacy Benefit Managers and groups funded by the National

Institutes of Health. More specifically, I have on several occasions over the past four years given paid speeches on the Tipping Point to pharmaceutical companies. So did that create a bias in favor of the pharmaceutical industry?"

Leave it to the master propagandist to pose an admission of guilt as a question

Most news organization have specific rules and guidelines about speaking fees, and some—including the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and the Washington Post—ban their journalists from taking fees for speeches. But the issue is far from settled, and regularly comes up in debates

about journalistic ethics. Jonathan Salant, former president of the Society of Professional Journalists Washington chapter, considers corporate speaking fees to be outright bribes. He’s not the only one.

In a March 2012 article in the Columbia Journalism Review, Paul Starobin wondered if speaking fees are a “dark and an indelible stain on journalism” and noted that most journalists would not talk openly about the details of their corporate speaker side-gigs on the record and that

some tried to prevent their names from being mentioned at all. The reason for their secrecy should be obvious to anyone: If you are paid tens of thousands of dollars by a company or lobby group for merely speaking at one of their conferences, wouldn’t you be more favorably

inclined to see things their way, and less eager to air their critics, than if you hadn’t been paid by them, and didn’t expect future payments as well?
archives.cjr.org

archives.cjr.org

The fact is, corporations and industries that Gladwell defends and promotes in print have paid him tens of thousands of dollars—more than what most Americans make in a year—for just a few hours of his time. And yet Gladwell feigns ignorance of the financial side of his speaking

business—he even pretends he doesn’t know who or what pays him how much

As he told New York Magazine in 2008, “I never deal with any of the money-negotiation part...It just goes into my account, so it’s like I’m not even aware.”
>tfw a million dollars a year goes into your account, and you're not even sure what happens to it...

About six months before world financial markets froze up in the summer of 2007, Malcolm Gladwell wrote another one of his “contrarian” articles for the New Yorker, this time 𝗱𝗲𝗳𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗘𝗻𝗿𝗼𝗻 𝗲𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀
newyorker.com

www.newyorker.com

Gladwell was most concerned for Enron President Jeffery Skilling, who was convicted of 19 felony counts, including securities fraud, conspiracy and insider trading, and sentenced to 24 years in prison—after having dished out $40 million on his defense. Poor baby

He had the nerve to argue that Enron’s investors were to blame for their losses, rather than accounting fraud, which he dismissed. His "analysis" was debunked and mocked by U.C. Berkeley Economics Professor Brad DeLong
Big ups to Brad, if you're ever in Queens I'll buy you lunch

According to Gladwell, the prosecution and jury were wrong; Skilling didn’t necessarily break any laws when he cooked books and conspired to defraud investors, prettying up Enron’s financial statements while looting the company, leaving investors and employees fleeced and in some

cases ruined. Gladwell implied, as is his wont, that the real culprits were the victims—investors who didn’t do their due diligence and properly sniff out Enron’s financial fraud, which Skilling and others did everything in their power to conceal

Gladwell argued that corporations should be expected to lie, cheat & steal - the pursuit of profit was always blameless - it’s up to investors to ferret out fraud & if they don’t, relying on the law and juries to punish the crimes was tantamount to rewarding investor failures

It was the same old Gladwell technique: blame victims for allowing themselves to be ripped off, lied to and robbed

But wait, it gets better
"Can anyone explain - in plain language - what it is Jeff Skilling and Co. did wrong?"
If it wasn't for Brad DeLong, we'd never have as close to a walkback as Malcom Gladwell had ever done in his life. Atta boy
gladwell.typepad.com

gladwell.typepad.com

Big ups to NYT business columnist Joe Nocera who pointed out even worse deception and journalistic malpractice - he grossly distorted a crucial piece of evidence that supposedly proved that Enron’s bad accounting practices were out in the open and easy to spot

An archive of the article can be found here, but there is one section in particular worth your attention:
evernote.com

www.evernote.com

A few days after his Enron article came out, Gladwell praised former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson for his dedication to “public service.” As Gladwell framed it, Paulson selflessly quit Wall Street to serve as U.S. Treasury Secretary
Imagine that

Gladwell further wrote that Paulson was part of a Washington D.C. “group that’s self-selected toward public service, as corny as it sounds.”
Aw shucks, it’s so corny - and yet so sincere!

Its bullshit, but to unpack it in the shortest amount of time, here are like 3 or 4 tweets about it:
Paulson’s move to Treasury was the furthest thing from selfless: Because of laws requiring him to sell his shares in Goldman Sachs, Paulson saved himself at least $100 million in

tax bills. That’s because, by law, any investments sold to avoid conflicts of interest are exempt from taxes. On top of that, Paulson used his position of “public service” to dole out trillions of bailout funds to his former banking colleagues, including mega-billions to Goldman

Sachs - one of the biggest beneficiaries of Paulson’s bailout scheme—at the end of the Bush presidency. His replacement at Goldman, Lloyd Blankfein, helped draw up the bailout plan with Paulson.
According to Malcom Gladwell, this was an example of "public service". Haha, man

To quote Malcolm Gladwell, Paulson’s decision to leave Goldman Sachs and come to Washington, D.C. was just more proof that that the capital is home to the nation’s most elite “intellectual and social culture” that thrives not on money, but on “ideas and social interactions”

And you can find them words right here
evernote.com

www.evernote.com

What comes to mind when you think 'Bank of America'?
For me, its that article from mic that detailed how they were the bank of choice for Mexican cartels to launder their money
For others its the 'lawsuits' and 'controversies' section from their wikipedia article

For reference:
mic.com

www.mic.com

If you're Malcom Gladwell, "Bank of America" means a multi-day, multi-city event designed to promote Bank of America’s commitment to small businesses at a moment when the banking industry was in the middle of a PR nightmare
Or "speaking gig tour" for something other than a book

This guy has got some nerve

Appearing on @joerogan's podcast helps people buy into the idea he's a human being with a conscious. How often does he have corporate shills in the form of walking filth sit across him on his program?

Utterly crushed that he was on @ConanOBrien's podcast. He shaped my sense of humor, and his work still resonates with me in a profound way
And yet, someone so sharp & smart evidently has zero issue having this grotesque parody of a human being on his podcast. That's a damn shame

I bet he sleeps like baby Jesus

If you own any of his work - buying something from us works off some bad karma. Check in on friends and family, too
queenstrash.com

queenstrash.com

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